Waymo raises $16 billion at $126 billion valuation
The round funds expansion into more than 20 new cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London, as Waymo says it now provides over 400,000 rides a week.
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Waymo raised $16 billion in new funding at a $126 billion post-money valuation, more than double the roughly $45 billion valuation it carried after its October 2024 round. The financing was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Mubadala, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and other investors; Alphabet, which spun Waymo out of its self-driving programme, remained the majority shareholder.
Waymo said the money would fund expansion into more than 20 additional cities during 2026, including its first moves outside the United States to Tokyo and London, on top of the six US metropolitan areas — plus a recent launch in Miami — where its robotaxis already operate. The company reported having passed 20 million lifetime paid rides, with weekly ride volume now exceeding 400,000, up from roughly 15 million rides across the whole of 2025.
The round places Waymo’s valuation well above most other AI-adjacent companies outside the frontier model labs, and reflects investor confidence that autonomous ride-hailing is moving from a small number of pilot cities toward a broader commercial rollout — an outcome that had been repeatedly delayed through the 2010s and early 2020s by the difficulty of the underlying driving problem rather than by lack of capital.